Why Franz Liszt is infuriating... and irresistible

Almost everyone admits that Franz Liszt was one of the giant figures of 19th-century music. And almost everyone despises him.

Why? A story from the high point of Liszt’s fame will explain. In 1844, the 33-year-old pianist was on one of his exhausting, triumphal European tours, giving enormous and enormously popular solo “recitals” (an idea he invented), while fending off (or pretending to fend off) the numerous high-born women who flung themselves at him. One of the stops on this tour was Montpellier, where a local music-lover reproached him for playing Bach’s A minor Prelude and Fugue in a flashy and vulgar way.

Liszt patiently showed him his three ways of playing Bach’s piece.

The first way was simple and unfussy, “as the author must have understood it”, as Liszt explained. Then he played it again, “with a slightly more picturesque movement and a more modern style”. Then, as he lit a cigar, Liszt said: “Now here is the way I would play it for the public – to astonish, as a charlatan.” And he then played the piece, so the cowed and overwhelmed Frenchman tells us, with all kinds of virtuoso feats that were “prodigious, incredible, fabulous” – while still managing to smoke his cigar.

There, in a nutshell, is the Liszt Problem. It’s not just that Liszt seemed a charlatan in the eyes of many people who saw him play (and in the ears of many listeners now, when faced with Liszt’s more emptily virtuoso pieces such as the Grand galop chromatique). It’s that he actually had the gall to admit it.

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Liszt offends against a belief that lovers of high culture cling to with religious fervour. This is the belief that art is one thing, and entertainment is another. The minute art tries to charm, or amaze with unbelievable physical skill, or thrill with a suggestion of brimstone and Witches’ Sabbaths, it stops being art and becomes light music, or a circus, or a Hammer House of Horrors.

For these high-minded types, Liszt is tainted with all three. And this damns him, because if someone does something in a way calculated to thrill or move, he can’t be sincere. But this is just a modern prejudice. It rests on the idea that you can draw a firm dividing line between the sincere “inner” person and the shallow “outer” one, which earlier and wiser eras would have found naive. In any case, the idea that Liszt was simply a shallow person collapses the minute you look at him with an unprejudiced eye.

If anything, Liszt suffered from an excess of noble and generous feelings. In his youth, he wanted to be a priest, and in the 1830s he was an eager supporter of all the new-fangled ideas of social reform being discussed in Paris. After he gave up the career of a travelling virtuoso, Liszt became director of music at the ducal court in Weimar, where he poured much of his prodigious energy into helping other composers, notably Berlioz and Wagner.

Later, when he had taken minor Catholic orders and was living in Rome, he dreamed of reinvigorating church music so that it could become “the meeting point between two worlds – the finite and the infinite”. Sir George Grove met him in 1868 and described him as “quite simple and good-hearted, a thorough, accomplished man of the world, without spite or conceit… He was not tall, but in that limited space was concentrated the pluck of 30 battalions.”

It would be nice to think that in Liszt’s 200th anniversary year, we might be tempted to suspend our sneers, and respond in kind to his magnificent generosity of spirit. This year’s Proms provide plenty of opportunity.

Marc-André Hamelin’s piano recital on August 24 includes two fine specimens of Liszt in transcendental, religious mode. Yes, the picture of St Francis Walking on the Water, complete with devilishly difficult left-hand runs, is ridiculously over the top. But it’s no contradiction to say that it’s also stirringly sublime.

If you prefer Liszt in diabolical, fire-and-brimstone mode, you might prefer the Mephisto Waltz in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Prom on September 2. To catch all of his capacious genius, you can’t do better than hear his titanic B minor Sonata, played by young Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili in the Chamber Music Prom on August 8.

The piece I’ll be looking out for is Venezia e Napoli, which also features in Hamelin’s recital. This is one of Liszt’s wonderful musical portraits of places he’d lived in or visited. They show how fundamentally unegoistic this incredibly magnetic personality really was. He could lose himself in the contemplation of a scene.

Byron, with whom Liszt is often compared, once imagined the joy of being dispersed into the landscape like air. The burden of selfhood would fall away. It’s a sentiment Liszt would surely have echoed.